Marathon and the Thrill of Losing

There is a particular class of people who react to the mention of Bungie as a company by getting a wistful look in their eyes and saying something like "oh... Bungie..." as though they had vanished like the Mary Celeste after releasing Halo: Reach. ↩︎

A brief recap for the uninitiated. Marathon's visual design is not just striking, but probably the best a AAA game has looked in a decade. It's not the graphical fidelity, although I have nothing to complain about on that score, but the establishment of an overarching design language that feels futuristic while being in conversation with [real-world visual design][]^[3]. It's a game that can be appreciated as visual art beyond the level of "wow pretty landscape", which is nearly unheard of in western AAA.

It is also extremely similar to the work of the digital artist Antireal, who as it turned out was followed on X by the Marathon design lead along with other members of the team. When some pixel-for-pixel Antireal art was found in the game's asset base, the scandal broke full-force, and a junior designer ended up fired. Fortunately, the story has as happy an ending as it can: Antireal was hired on as a design consultant, she's expressed satisfaction with the arrangement, and the game's design visual design has only improved since then. ↩︎

The Designers Republic is its own story, a firm so colossally influential on the look we now think of as "Y2K" that it became a visual cliché. In Christa's words, the ability to build on that design in a fresh and interesting way "speaks to how well it is pulled off in Marathon". ↩︎

Even then I entirely missed Goldeneye 007, to this day the definitive video game incarnation of the storied imperialist running dog. ↩︎

For those unfamiliar with this relatively new genre, it functions similarly to a battle royale in that multiple players or teams are placed on a shared map where they can shoot one another^[7]. However, the goal isn't specifically to kill other players; it's to accomplish missions and collect resources from the map, often by doing challenges not involving other players such as killing powerful NPCs. You bring resources you've accumulated, including weapons and armor, into future runs to accomplish harder goals, creating a risk/reward dynamic both in the challenges you attempt and in how tempting a target you make yourself for other players to hunt. ↩︎

This is, I admit, not entirely true. I still haven't played the most recent two chapters of Deltarune, and too many people have told me how excellent Of the Devil is for me to ignore it just because I find the art style unappealing. But sometimes one's fingers itch to play a game with a sense of motion^[9]. ↩︎

Different extraction shooters vary in how much they encourage player-on-player combat^[7:1], although a universal constant is that killing a player allows you to loot the corpse and take all their best items. Marathon is reportedly pretty far towards encouraging bloodthirsty play, as is Escape from Tarkov^[8]. By contrast, ARC Raiders is known for being relatively low-conflict. ↩︎ ↩︎

The progenitor of the "extraction shooter", and another foundational shooter that I've never played nor had any real interest in. ↩︎ ↩︎

Despite its motive fundamentals, though, Marathon is decidedly menus rather than parkour. This should come as no surprise given that Bungie's other active game^[10] is explicitly called out as menus in the original comic. ↩︎

I was surprised to hear that some Destiny 2 players are grumpy^[11] that Marathon exists instead of Bungie spending more time on their pet game, and are making their views vocally known on Twitch chats and social media. Specifically, I was surprised that there were still enough Destiny 2 players in existence to make this amount of noise, given that the peak monthly player count in 2026 was just a third of what it was in 2025. Personally, I think it probably makes sense for a company^[12] to work on a game that people actually seem interested in playing. ↩︎

apoplectic ↩︎

subsidiary of Sony Interactive Entertainment LLC ↩︎

Surely this is a distinction that needs no further explanation. ↩︎

Framing this in terms of "levels" is actually an oversimplification. In practice, it begins as more of a question of which role a player is taking on. Are you going in with the intent to complete quests? To accumulate resources? To hunt other players? Where is the fun for you? Even this is too simple, though, because the roles can shift on a dime based on what happens in the field. A run that was intended to be a zero-stakes[^free kit] player hunt can immediately become a high-stakes meticulous exfiltration if you find loot you care enough about. Any run can become a PvP run if there are players in between you and your objective. ↩︎

Successfully exfiltrating with a free kit also gives the player a cosmetic recolor of their current shell^[16], leading to days when a player has access to one of the more aesthetically satisfying free kits and so wants to do runs with it over and over. This sideways benefit cleverly undermines the potential for free kit use to feel like a failure; even once the player has as many skins as they care to get, they're acclimated to free kits as a low-pressure alternative to bringing in real gear. ↩︎

class ↩︎

Certainly not if I keep writing more footnotes than I write body text. Sometimes ideas are a straight line, and sometimes they're a tree. Today is a tree kind of day. ↩︎

The tension of the draw step^[19] as driven by the land system is in fact the heart of why that game engine is as successful as it is and has as much depth as it does. Compare to the Vs. System where tournament results were famously always a list of the best players in order of skill and no one ever wanted to start playing only to lose constantly; compare also to the World of Warcraft TCG where the variance was so concentrated in the opening die roll to determine who got the first turn that the winner of that roll was wildly favored to win the game. Magic sits at a comfortable point where the very best players have something like a 65% win rate against other pros; real, respectable, but not dominant. ↩︎

It's also worth noting that the amount that a given card draw determines the course of the game is never quite so dramatic as it seems in the moment. Part of the genius of Magic is its lenticularity^[20]: all the decisions you've made in the game up to that point contribute to how much weight the next card has to your game, and an expert player has room to line those decisions up in a way that is completely invisible to players who see each new card as a wholly disconnected event. ↩︎

When I was young, I was a huge reader of Mark Rosewater's blog. These days I'm a lot cooler on him as a writer and even as a designer, although I think a lot of what I find off-putting in his latter role is due to the tension between his dual roles as design educator and product cheerleader for a company^[21] subject to inevitable capitalist rot. I deeply wish he found more space to grapple with what was wrong with his own explanations in the past rather than presenting direct contradictions as simple fact. But I do think this article in particular contains fundamental insight into a critical aspect of design, not just for games but for anything whose goal is to provide a path for people to move from beginner to expert. ↩︎

subsidiary of Hasbro, Inc. ↩︎

The point of a game is also engaging with people. In fact, the human connection is probably more important for me than any individual aspect of my own personal play. Even single-player games (even novels and films) I conceptualize as interpersonal acts—I'm connecting with the creator, with everyone else who's experienced the same thing through the perspective of their own prior experiences, with the novel angle on the human experience that every piece of art brings. Because our manifestation of sentience is itself catalyzed by human contact, all conscious articulated thought is intrinsically interpersonal.

I don't consider this incompatible with the idea that the point of the game is the emotions, though. Those emotions are an aspect of the conscious interpretation of the game as a space, and they're the deepest expression of the game's effect on us that can be shared between different players. The emotional outcome of playing a game is the foundation of any possibility for discussing that game with others. ↩︎

Personally I find the impulse to try to make genre names perfectly accurate pretty Quixotic. Terminology as used in practice is always imprecise, and while I find thoughtful discussions of the specific ways in which games fit into our squishy ideas of genre fascinating, I think of the specific names more as opaque identifiers of those shared concepts than anything I'd expect to be accurately descriptive in itself. ↩︎

Boiling games down to basic relationships between coarse-grained mechanics is a pretty bad way to understand them as entire works of art, but I find it very useful as a way of placing them within the larger landscape of design and especially genre. By virtue of themselves being abstractions across many games, genres are often^[25] expressed in these heavily mechanistic terms, and thus to make themselves legible to players most games involve at least some thought of how they'll be expressed in the "elevator pitch" style of conjunctive description. ↩︎

Even the "survival horror" genre, whose name is so focused on its emotional content and which at first blush suggests a strong aesthetic grounding, ends up being defined primarily in mechanical terms: they're games about carefully managing resources too limited to deal with all the game's threats. The fact that this lends itself well to a mood of tension and fear almost feels like a happy accident. ↩︎

There's an interesting question lying latent here: how much is our understanding of "the point" of a genre driven by our expectations of other genres that surround it? Extraction shooters come from a particular moment in game design as a medium, in the shadow of battle royale and roguelike as ascendant genres. It makes sense that we name and frame it in contrast to those, when the key distinction is taking stuff between runs. But you can also imagine a world where something more like the traditional dungeon-delving RPG is the genre du jour and "leaving with more than you came with" is taken for granted as the point of a unit of play. How would we describe an extraction shooter in that world? ↩︎

You can think of this as motivating the player to beat their own high score. The game is, in a sense, divided up into little stretches of challenge between checkpoints; if you make it a little further each time you try to move from one checkpoint to another, you'll get your souls back, demarcating a success (even if a qualified one). In this way, the genre superimposes the arcade-style play pattern of "repeat this challenge until it goes from insurmountable to possible to complete" onto a each section of an action-RPG. ↩︎

I've done this almost three times: once for Elden Ring, once for Dark Souls, and not quite to the end of Sekiro^[29]. The substantial majority of these runs weren't even very hard—these games are made to be beaten. The difficulty sliders that people howl for do exist, they're just part of the play of the game itself. If anything, it's easier to beat them at level 1 but with everything other than that set up to be the easiest it possibly can than to beat a casual playthrough you're not trying particularly hard to optimize for power. ↩︎

Sekiro is an odd game because it doesn't have a single definition of "level" that clearly matches other games. Instead, it has three separate levels for attack power, health/defense, and unlockable skills. I only leveled the latter, which means that my damage output was such that I'd need to spend 15 minutes fighting near-perfectly to clear the final boss, something I have not yet found the stamina to train myself to do. ↩︎